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The closest thing to a baguette 20 years ago in Toronto was a tasteless, insubstantial "French stick" that bore little resemblance to the crusty, chewy French original.

Back then, a bistro usually was little more than a small restaurant with checked tablecloths. It might serve steak frites as an entrée but probably didn't offer duck confit, veal kidneys or other mainstays of a similarly low-key Parisian establishment. Tarte au citron was lemon pie. And while lemon pie can be very scrumptious in its own way, it is not tarte au citron.

All that has changed. Relatively authentic bistros with names such as Tati and Batifole are popping up like dandelions all over the Greater Toronto culinary landscape (see review of Aggie Martin on E7). Foodies now can debate the relative merits of baguettes from Thuet, Fred's or Stonemill, to say nothing of the oven goods available from smaller bakeries, many of which make a bang-up tarte au citron.

While all this was happening, France was spiralling in the opposite direction, according to author Michael Steinberger. Au Revoir to All That: Food, Wine and the End of France is not appetizing news for anyone finally about to embark on that once-in-lifetime vacation to Paris and Provence.

Make no mistake, there is still plenty of good food to be found from St. Malo to Cannes and Bordeaux to Strasbourg. You just can't take it for granted any more.

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"In Italy, you can still walk into any old town and find yourself a decent meal. And 25 years ago, you could do that in France," says Steinberger, 42, a Delaware-based wine columnist for Slate, the Financial Times and other publications. "These days, as a U.S. wine importer friend of mine who spends half his year in France put it to me: `If you don't know where you're going in some of these towns and villages, you can be poisoned.'

"People from the U.S., England or Canada are coming to this supposed gastronomic Mecca and discovering that they are eating better at home. In the global sense, it's a story of a bunch of other countries rising and France sliding. Have we passed yet? No. But a lot has been lost."

Steinberger admits he didn't want to hear it when, a decade ago, Adam Gopnik started writing in The New Yorker about the decline in French cooking. "I was a particularly lovestruck Francophile," says Steinberger, who was smitten by a simple dish of peas in butter when he first visited France at the age of 13.

"The country changed my relationship with food in a lot of ways. It has taught me that food was not just a form of sustenance but also a source of pleasure.

"Then I started to notice that a favourite restaurant had taken a turn for the worse and that other places I visited were just not what they should have been."

Steinberger, walking on a cast after tearing his Achilles tendon playing tennis, might not have been the first to blow the whistle. But his indictment is unequivocal. While much of the book focuses on the highest tiers of the French culinary establishment, whose exalted stature is being rivalled by more innovative chefs from England, the U.S. and particularly Spain, he insists that the rot runs top to bottom.

The main culprits, as Steinberger sees it, are threefold: complacency fostered by the hidebound Michelin star system; decades of French economic stagnation; and the erosion of home cooking as the foundation for the country's culture of culinary excellence. France ranks second only to the U.S. in its per capita appetite for McDonald's – much, no doubt, to the everlasting consternation of José Bové, the French farmer and anti-globalization activist who famously drove a bulldozer through one of the chain's outlets.

The book cites many French food and wine professionals who are as concerned about the situation as the author but, so far, no French publisher has signed on.

"I knew going in that the French aren't particularly interested in the opinions of outsiders. And they are particularly loath to entertain the opinion of outsiders when it comes to their food.

"If the book is read the way I'd like it to be read, people will understand that I'm someone with a great love of France and its food. This book might remind them of what they've had and what is being lost. And it might, in some tiny way, bring about a revitalization."

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